Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#21

Post by aaronscott » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 4:06 AM UTC

It’s been really helpful for picking up a new programming language. Particularly around helping me understand conventions in a language I’m not familiar with.

GPT-4 has been great at breaking down complex regexes that I am too lazy to parse out in the moment.

I’m also finding it helpful as a creative partner on naming things. Something I feel like I spend a lot of time noodling on. Like: creative names for a data warehouse that are surfing related (BoardRoomData lol).

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#22

Post by bassrattle » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 4:06 AM UTC

I use it to give me the perfect functions for any task I can dream up in Google Sheets. Some conplex functions seem like a novel I never would have made, but it works very well so quickly and when it errors, it nearly always can debug. It understands the Maps for Sheets extension well and I'm trying to teach it to master GPT for Sheets.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#23

Post by abdullahkhalids » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 4:07 AM UTC

My big question is, are people at OpenAI actively using GPT as part of their work? Are they getting a productivity boost because of it?

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#24

Post by maytc » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 4:10 AM UTC

I've been using it as an aid in my writing process. Essentially, I can now pour my thoughts onto paper, complete with errors and poor word choices. With just a click, GPT transforms it into a presentable version.

Basically I created a small app to streamline the workflow. https://henshu.ai

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#25

Post by Mavvie » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 4:11 AM UTC

I've mostly been using it to write shell scripts, or to answer specific/hard to Google questions about various libraries/tools.

Sometimes I use it to help me come up with names for projects/classes, sometimes I use it for debugging help (X doesn't work, why not?)

I think I could get a lot more out of it if I was more creative. It's an incredibly valuable tool already (on a similar level as intellij for me)

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#26

Post by SomewhatLikely » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 4:15 AM UTC

One off extractions from semi structured text like an email or paragraphs from a webpage. Sure, I could spend 40 seconds coming up with a regex that I run to reformat how I want it, or I can just say it in plain terms. And if I need something a little more involved it has my back too: "Extract the domains from these urls as one column and give a user friendly name for the website in the second column and give a short description of what the purpose of the site is in the third column"

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#27

Post by why5s » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 4:16 AM UTC

Various things:

- Non-technical explanations. Useful for the pointy-haired boss. And his boss as well.

- Stack Overflow (but on steroids).

- Summarizing long-form articles my friends send me.

- Generating rudimentary programs/scripts I'm too lazy to write on my own.

- Tutorial-style resources for unfamiliar technology (like writing CRDs in k8s).

- Generated a working Makefile.

- Sometimes, I'll take existing small programs in Go and have them rewritten in another language. It's just fucking cool to watch.

- Rudimentary translations from English to French.

Can't use CoPilot for work yet since, well, they can (and will) upload proprietary IP. But for everything else in life, the productivity gain has been enormous.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#28

Post by tyoma » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 4:17 AM UTC

monero-xmr wrote: post #2

I have asked ChatGPT tax questions, some of which I knew the answers to and others not. I think it’s a great summarizer if the spammy blogs out there. It’s great for bash one-liners with flags and OS-specific nuances. Haven’t really been able to use it for really advanced things. But maybe someday.

Be careful with tax questions.

I asked some for a moderately complicated tax situation and ChatGPT very authoritatively imagined a deduction that didn’t exist by combining two different but related parts of the tax code.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#29

Post by echelon » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 4:17 AM UTC

jrmann100 wrote: post #6

I find ChatGPT most helpful as a "what's that called" tool. A lot of my queries are finding/confirming the right idiom when writing something, or getting a specific name out of a vague description (JavaScript concepts, shell commands, CSS selectors). Search engines with SEO are so reliant on keywords that it often feels like I'm suggesting answers rather than asking questions - it's so refreshing to be able to just a…

It's replaced Google for the "what's that called" tool.

Google used to be good at that task, but it's sucked for the last four years or so. Whenever they gave up on search and leaned into sludge content plus ads.

ChatGPT is better than Google ever was anyway.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#30

Post by zzleeper » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 4:19 AM UTC

jmann99999 wrote: post #15

Generally rewriting emails for clarity... but I found another neat use of GPT-4. For public APIs, I ask to make sure its aware of the api. Then I ask for endpoints. I find the endpoint I want. Then I ask it to code a request to the endpoint in language X (Ruby, Python, Elixir). It then gives me a starting point to jump off from. Thirty seconds of prompt writing saves me about 20 minutes of getting setup. Yes, I have…

Can you provide an example of what prompts would you use?